TILTING AT WINDMILLS AND OTHER THINGS

So would you? A windmill, I mean. Would you install a windmill in your garden? I was asking myself this yesterday as I pondered whether I should be making another short haul flight down to the Auverne.

So I Googled ‘windmills’ - or rather ‘small wind turbines’ and lo! it turns out that there are folk ready to sell me a dainty little model on a 10 metre stalk, set in a block of concrete and connected to my fuse box for the measly sum of £9,000.

With my thoughts still on the Auverne I calculate that once £9,000 would have been about €5,000 - now it’s about €10,000 euros - another illustration of how Britain will quickly have to learn how to become self-sufficient for it is rapidly becoming too expensive to buy anything from abroad - like oil, for instance, or gas.

Now £9,000 doesn’t seem unreasonable for a big concrete block in the windward corner of my garden with a windmill on top. I could even see it finally extinguishing the ever expanding Yucca plant with which I am due another skirmish shortly.

Quite indestructible are Yuccas, except perhaps by large amounts of concrete, though I’m told they are a useful plant if you’re about to become self-sufficient. You can weave the fibres into cloth and use the pointed leaves as skewers or needles. Allegedly.

Besides the demise of the Yucca, my windmill would bring me free energy and in addition £0.12 for every kilowatt hour I returned to the grid. Quite a bargain, except that the tables say I live in a spot less windy than the average and therefore that my windmill would supply only one third of the electricity that I use.

What! less that averagely windy? There are times when the wind howls and I fear for my fences. I have already lost half a fig tree. I see from my window that the trees are tossing merrily. On the other hand yesterday it was quite still and for some days before that. So it seems it would take 60 years to get my money back, by which time I shall be dead, if I haven't succumbed to global warming in the meantime.

Still I would have built a windmill if it had been practical. I don’t object to how they look. The turbines high on the northern hills above my town have a certain ghostly elegance. The I thought that perhaps it would be more sensible to let someone else build the windmill and to buy the electricity from them.

So I emailed my current supplier who tells me that if I cut my consumption by 10 per cent I can move to a green tariff. But I haven’t cut my consumption by 10 per cent! And nor am I likely to. Despite my criticisms of the ban on incandescent light bulbs, virtually all the serious lighting in the house is energy saving. I am not going to sit in the dark, nor give up using the oven. And we already turn off at the wall where we can.

True we could go out and buy a new cooker, fridge and dishwasher - but the energy involved in their new manufacture (all that steel to be smelted and rolled from iron ore brought half way round the world, the paint and plastic made from hydrocarbons, the packaging and the overheated showrooms) mean that I’d be starting with a substantial carbon deficit (let alone a bank account deficit) which would require as long to payback as my windmill.

Why is there no requirement to inform us of the carbon cost of new energy saving appliances? Your new car may have low emissions but the factories that made it and brought it to you certainly don’t.

But a post from kind Woozle tells me of another company - Ecotricity - offering to sell me green electricity. Fine - but then I lose the discounts that I get from being with my existing supplier from whom I buy gas as well.

Besides, if I (and fellow eco-warriors) buy up all the green energy everyone else is left with the brown (non-renewable) stuff. I am not actually helping the poor old planet, however virtuous I may feel to be 100 per cent green. Though in fairness to Ecotricity they do say that they invest only in renewable sources of power.

What about gas on which the central heating runs? I’ve a feeling that you should be able to buy green gas, produced from biomass, though I haven’t seen this advertised anywhere. Why not, I wonder? The technology is available to produce gas from digesters and we do discard a vast potential source of biogas every time we visit the bathroom.

Apparently we expend 80 calories in fuel and fertiliser to produce one calorie’s worth of edible food. As someone said once we spend all this money creating this waste and then we just throw it away.

But I am still scratching my head about how best to atone for my flight down to the Auverne next week. There we are greener than here. Our heat comes from great wood burning stoves, our power from French nuclear electricity.

I have never had much fear of nuclear energy. Indeed I see it as much the best short term solution to providing the large amounts of standby power that the world demands. Britain was once a world leader in this field; a place we have sadly long ceded.

Indeed I read only this week that Areva, the French nuclear giant, hopes to build 60 reactors across the world in the next few years, including some in Britain. Demand is fast picking up, they say.

Maybe I shall get my low-carbon electricity after all. Meanwhile, I comfort myself that even with the Auverne trips our carbon footprint is still respectable. Well, just.

TALES FROM AN ECO-VILLAGE

Monday 21 September: I’m having dinner in the BioMio restaurant in Copenhagen with about 90 other bloggers, mainly from Europe but some from further afield. I’m sitting next to a Brazilian called Charles, for instance, who has just flown in from Sao Paulo. Opposite me there’s Tasha, an editor from the United States, and Radka from the Czech Republic, while Jodi, though an Australian, joins me in representing the UK.

We are here at the invitation of the European Journalism Centre, an NGO based in Maastricht. Our job in the next three months or so will be to blog about climate change in the run-up to the UN summit which takes place in December. To help us we are being given two days of briefing.

Today we have been in the Bella Centre, a strange low rise complex on the outskirts of Copenhagen, that looks like an airport terminal without an airport. Much of it is still under construction but it is where the two week Climate Change Summit will be taking place.

No-one knows how many people will be coming: the Danes guess at about 15,000, made up of government leaders and officials from 192 countries, plus the world’s media, NGOs like Oxfam and WWF, and a whole tail of climate activists there to put pressure on the politicians. All have to be accommodated, fed, transported and most importantly, policed. That’s the unenviable job of the Danish government.

After a day of sitting listening to presentations it is stimulating to have the chance to meet and discuss matters with fellow bloggers. The international atmosphere is stimulating; I am lucky that the common and now universal language is English. Most speak and write it mesmerisingly well. I ask Radka where she learned such perfect idiomatic English. She replies that she worked for a British company for a year in the Yorkshire countryside and went fox-hunting on Saturdays.

The following day we are up early bound for the eco-village of Dyssekilde. This is both a social and environmental experiment - a village into which a dedicated group of ecologically minded folk moved about twenty years ago and generally succeeded in persuading the rest of the inhabitants to follow their environmentally friendly lead.



The two hundred odd people in the village own a wind turbine for electricity (though the grid is available as back-up). They process their own waste water, having created more than an acre of willow beds to absorb the waste. The trees grow rapidly on the nutrients in the waste providing wood for fuel and fencing. For eco-efficiency there’s a communal bakery and a laundry and the one supplies heat to the other. There’s also a car pool to save on car purchase.

Most of the houses are experimental, heated by solar panels or geo-thermal energy - again arranged on a group basis. Some are strange polygons, minimizing surface area; others are built of novel materials, like straw (though lined inside and outside with conventional materials).

Surprisingly, these communal living arrangements seem to work well. No one is forced to do anything. Residents pay a small tax to the village and opt in or out of the communal projects. I have to say that the place looked rather unkempt and generally rundown: a lick of paint, some communal grass cutting might not have gone amiss, but maybe ecologists have other priorities. Mowing grass probably does not help your carbon footprint.

Can we do anything worthwhile as climate change bloggers? Despite starting with a massive imbalance - the result of ninety return flights to Copenhagen - I'd like to think we possibly can. The word needs to be spread; people need to understand what is likely to be required and be prepared to adapt accordingly. Politicians need to understand that there is a willingness for change among the population. We can't do much by ourselves but it's worth remembering that a million ants can move a mountain.

The threat to our planet is both serious and imminent. That’s what the scientists are telling us. Their worst case scenarios made only a few years ago are already being exceeded. In 1990 they predicted the rate of fossil fuel burning would increase annually by 1.1 per cent. That figure looks now more like 3.5 per cent.

The consensus is that the situation could well become irretrievable unless we all act now. Clearly governments have the prime responsibility - the world is not going to be saved by eco-villages, though of course these can help. But ultimately only governments can provide the infrastructure to deliver large amounts of clean energy.

Getting 192 countries - all with different agendas - to agree will be difficult to put it mildly. There is so much disagreement on other matters, trade, development, finance, security and so on. Somehow the politicians will have to find compromises, if not in December, then shortly afterwards. As the Chinese say - we are living in interesting times.

The photos show: a house and turbine at Dyssekilde; the waste water willow groves; and a rooftop solar energy apparatus

LAST NIGHT

Saturday September 5th 7.45pm. It is the last night of ‘Art.’ I am in the dressing room, fiddling with make-up. Fifteen short minutes to curtain. K, a very beautiful eighteen year old who is helping with the props, thinks I use too much. You don’t need any, she chides. Still, I persist.

Beside me, L, an experienced actor who has appeared on the London stage produces an ultra-professional make-up kit, packaged in webbing. I just have to delve in the theatre’s plastic box whose contents are a hopeless jumble; most of this stuff is years old. I’m the only one who dares use it. Except the powder perhaps.

In the show L plays my friend, Serge. I fuss for something to darken my eyebrows. A pencil is nowhere to be found. I haven’t the courage to ask L. So I have to make do with some dark eye-shadow. I manage, just, to avoid looking like a pirate. K snorts her disgust.

I don a dark French blazer - this is a French play after all - Pierre Cardin - and found in a bric à brac shop in St Brieuc twenty-five years ago. I suspect it dates from the sixties. Anyway it has gilt buttons. I put a red spotted handkerchief in the top pocket. It reminds me for some reason of Peter Rabbit and therefore of luck. I straighten myself up, dust down the blazer and tuck my impossible hair behind my ears, all the while creeping slowly into my smug and supercilious character, who for some reason carries a raincoat.

The stage manager’s call comes. I take the raincoat from its peg. A last look in the mirror and then I am drawing the bolts on the back dressing room door, for I have to enter via the auditorium. They are stiff and I have a momentary panic that I shall still be there, unable to open the door, long after the show has started. But suddenly the door is open.

Outside all is deserted. I creep into the empty foyer, patiently watching through a chink for the house lights to go down. I can hear the Chairman’s voice making announcements - “unlike most theatres we encourage you to use your mobile phones during the performance, but please note we charge a £50 fee if you choose to do so.” A titter of laughter.

The laughter subsides, the opening music starts, the house lights dim. I slip into the darkness, looking towards the blackness of the vacant stage, repeating under my breath the word ‘brush,’ which is supposed to compose the features. Routine! Carrying my raincoat I begin to walk up the aisle.

The music fades, the stage lights go up. Now, I am climbing the steps to the stage. A curious feeling this arriving on stage - a private feeling. Of being completely in command. As of entering a railway carriage. All the time in the world.

I hang the raincoat over a chair and out of the corner of the eye catch the red spot stuck to the stage. Stand upon it and the 650w white spot fifteen feet away catches you right between the eyes. I stand just to the side, glancing at the audience. Even so, the spot bores into me, making everything I see black. I can just make out a few shapes, a few faces. Deep breath:

“My friend Serge has bought a painting....
It’s a canvas, about five foot by four, white.
The background is white and if you screw up your eyes you can make out some fine white diagonal lines.
Serge is one of my oldest friends.........”

I am conscious that, somewhere behind me, L has come on and is busy removing the cover from the white painting. I finish my speech and he looks at me in expectation. I look at him and at the painting - forward, backward, chin in hand, scratch the head, pull glasses out of blazer, examine something minutely, turn away, pause: ‘Expensive?’ I ask.

We are off. The lines flow and with them the action, the emotion. On the last night I am always conscious that this is really a ‘last’ - the last time I shall say these lines. I have a mental vision of tearing up the script as I go along. Like that sad, sad film of the Germans retreating from the Russian steppes in a train that draws behind it a great hook that tears up the sleepers in its wake.

One scene flows into another. On stage we are, in more ways than one, in another world. Gone is the normal flotsam and jetsam of the mind hovering around just above or below the level of consciousness; the day to day concerns of work, life, love, money, ageing; out go the infirmities, the pains, the tiredness, the stress of everyday living. On stage one is just a character without a background, uncrippled by age or guilt or a thousand of life’s problems. Play characters are like new born babes - sans baggage. Acting is like sleep, I suppose, or perhaps a dream.

I have the first speech in this play and also the last.

“My friend Serge has bought a painting
It’s a canvas about five feet by four
It represents a man who moves across a space
And disappears.”

The applause clatters away. We line up. Bow, once, twice, thrice and then peel off into the wings and into the dressing room. And soon I am quite alone there. For reasons quite unknown to medical science I am pathologically unable to get changed or unchanged in the same sort of time as anyone else. If they take four minutes I will take eight or even ten. I cannot begin to understand why. The result is I am always being called and have to decant to meet my public with laces still undone and clothing never quite adjusted.

A glass of champagne awaits and armed with this I venture into the bar, where the traditional CADS Saturday night supper is in full swing. Bread, paté and cheese. And wine of course. Never was something quite so simple, quite so tasty. Or made to go so far. If the good Lord ever were to run out of loaves and fishes then paté and cheese would be an acceptable substitute to feed the five thousand.

I am congratulated by different people. The best adulation is both gross and faked. You know it is faked and they know it is faked - but nevertheless it makes you both feel good about yourselves. “Darling you were wonderful, quite wonderful. However, do you do it? All those lines? Entirely believable! Better than the performance at the New Theatre. Just fabulous.”

But something understated, a reserved smile, a pat on the back, a kiss, a ‘well-done’ also charms the soul. It’s when the adulation is not faked that you know you have problems.

Some more champagne, the Chairman congratulates everyone. The Director receives a bunch of white flowers that mimic the painting and then we pack up. The guests go, the lights turn off and I am out again in the darkness of the muddy car park. Both literally and metaphorically my feet turn to clay. Come on K, let’s get you home!

Leprechauns, Mermaids and Copenhagen

We’re gearing up for the Climate Change blogging competition: the Copenhagen programme has arrived and I’m looking forward to it immensely. It seems excellently planned with an interesting mix between technical and information sessions and then there’s the EcoVisit - namely to the Dyssekilde Ecovillage in Torup, North Sealand with, on the way, a photo-opportunity at Middelgrunden Wind park. Can you park wind, I ask? (Note to self: Don’t be facetious): the ecological village has a population of 130 adults and 50 children who share a vision of a socially, economically and ecologically sustainable community.

The village has its own school and kindergarten, and it is divided into five housing areas with very interesting architecture. (I wonder what that means?) We are enjoined to wear sensible shoes as Dyssekilde only has dirt roads, and there will be coffee, tea, fresh fruit and vegetable snacks waiting for us upon arrival.

More prosaically, I am looking forward to seeing the city of Copenhagen and the little Mermaid - though I have in my possession a miniature statue of it sent to me by someone in Finland called Tea Maria with whom, very many years ago, I used to have long and rather sad discussions about Leprechauns, examples of whose enchanting presence have never quite made it, apparently, across the North and Baltic Seas.

Finland, we concluded, would suit Leprechauns very well as the folk there are always in need of mended shoes and, moreover, have a penchant for gold which Leprechauns would surely have no trouble at all in filing away. It is one of the wonders of nature that in all the history of the Scandinavian invasions of Ireland not one of the little green men ever managed to secrete himself and his whiskers aboard a Viking longship and return to the land of Thor. (Or maybe he did - cue for a story here perhaps).

Anyway, I have had little to do with Copenhagen in the past. It’s somewhere I have never managed to see much of, though I do have early morning memories of a crossing to Malmo once and seeing Hamlet’s castle - Elsinore - through the mist.

Shakespeare’s full play by lasts for four hours. I have seen a ‘lite’ version done in two, which was fast moving and pacy. Also great fun. But now I have come across a version of Hamlet reduced to a single act of fifteen scenes. Hamlet in 45 minutes! Maybe we shall have some fun with that at Christmas here in our little drama society.

But enough, I must turn my thoughts to climate change. Reading up background material to prepare for the next three months I am becoming ever more depressed. What with glaciers crumbling, deserts growing, forests disappearing, dead zones in the ocean; one group of scientists saying ‘we must,’ while another, equally eminent, says ‘no - that’s too dangerous!’ Just say ‘nuclear power’ and you see what I mean.

And last night I watched a television programme about trawlermen fishing in the North Sea. Scooping up at great expense - or so it seemed to me - quantities of immature fish. Is it any wonder that we find we have problems with the climate when the oceans - representing two thirds of our planet’s surface - are dying?

Still, depressing though it is, I am finding it hard to find coherent explanations of what is happening and what we should do about it. I hope for enlightenment in Copenhagen - though whether from the Mermaid, the non-existent Leprechauns or even Hamlet is unclear.
The earth is shrouded not in mist but in a blanket of excess carbon. Even if all man-made emissions stopped tomorrow I read that this excess blanket of some 250 gigatonnes (Gt) worth of CO2 would take a long time to go away. And in the meantime the earth will continue to heat up - won’t it?

Yet the major part of our effort and the focus of our politicians seems to be in saving relatively small amounts of emissions - and in this context 20 or 30 per cent is small. The blanket will still be getting thicker, the earth hotter.

Something else I find hard to understand is why, when the total annual natural carbon flux between the atmosphere and the land and sea is of the order of 200 Gt in each direction, why the relatively small amount (in proportion) of man-made emissions (say around 6-8 Gt currently) should be causing such a problem.

This is not in any way to deny the realities of climate change or the role of carbon dioxide in exacerbating it - simply to pose the question: is the problem more to do with the environment’s failing capacity to absorb carbon than with our fossil fuel burning habits in particular?

Because you see - and this is what I do find truly depressing - we have been busy despoiling the environment for as long as we have been burning fossil fuels. We have even reached the absurd situation where we engage in deforestation practices to plant oil crops to turn into fossil fuel replacements.

What if the environment becomes so damaged that it cannot even cope with natural emissions of CO2? What then? The atoms of the carbon blanket in the sky are not labelled with where they came from. The carbon dioxide from the compost in my garden, from my breath and your breath and the respiration of cells generally, from evaporation out of the sea, is exactly the same carbon dioxide that comes from a coal-fired power station.

That seems to me the really depressing thought and a compelling reason to lighten, drastically, the environmental load we impose on our fragile planet and to plant trees and grow shellfish (whose shells lock carbon away for a million years) wherever we can.

So for these reasons I am doubly looking forward to my visit to Dyssekilde Ecovillage (not forgetting the coffee, tea, fresh fruit and vegetable snacks will be there upon arrival! And should any Leprechaun be reading this and wishes to hitch a ride then he will be welcome to join me so long as he doesn’t mind travelling as hand luggage.

THE OLD WOMAN OF HVALSEY

I think some of you know I was selected as a blogger to write about climate change for the THINKABOUTIT competition run by the European Journalism Centre. The Competition hasn't started yet and we haven't had our trip to Copenhagen which is later this month, but I wrote this preliminary piece below and as I was quite pleased with it I thought I would crave your indulgence and post it here. It is basically true in all its grander particulars, though I may have elided one or two bits here and there in the interests of the plot. Artistic licence you can call it. Hvalsey is in South-Eastern Greenland. Google maps finds it quite well. (And for Rosie - or rather for Joni if she sees this - this is a story about Norwegians - well Norsemen anyway - that
I hope you will find every bit as compelling as recycling things).


THE STORY

Here is a story about climate change - although not about global warming. And if it’s not a story about Danes and Copenhagen, then it’s still a story about Scandinavians. It’s a story that I first heard about long ago, in a bout of childish illness, on the radio. The words climate change were unknown then - at least to the general public, but I remember this tale of an old woman, whose voice seemed to fill my sickroom with a chill.

She spoke of a little colony by the sea, somewhere where once there had been trees, great birches six metres tall and abundant grass with which the farmers made hay to feed their wintering animals in great turf-roofed byres. Indeed, so green was this land that Erik the Red, the Norseman who founded the colony, called it Greenland. Ships came from Iceland and further east and the colony thrived for several hundred years.

The settlers built houses with the flat stones that lay close to the surface and at Hvalsey, one of the biggest settlements, they built a high and wide church and plastered the outside with pulverised mussel shells whose nacre glowed in the low rays of the sun, making the church appear white and sparkling and fluorescent.

The colony thrived until some time around the beginning of the fourteenth century the farmers began to notice how little soil there now seemed to be. The rich loam that had lain under the birch trees had been eroded by the rain and the wind and washed into the sea. The trees had been cut for building and for firewood and to make fields but now the summers seemed to be shorter, the winters longer. The settlers had to go further for timber, the fields were less productive, everyone was poorer.

The church elders sought a dispensation from the Pope; from 1345 and on account of their poverty the settlement was absolved from the payment of tithes. Some settlers began to leave. But the Norse folk are hardy and tenacious. Most clung on. But the old woman, whose words had chilled me, said that the colony was doomed. The colony was doomed because it would be extinguished by the cold and the snow.

She said that on the low hills that rose above the sea, where once the beech trees had grown, snow now lay. Of course the hills had always been snow-covered in winter but the summer sunshine would melt the snow and the cattle would graze on the summer pasture and the wildflowers. But now there were patches of snow that didn’t melt all summer long, even on those hills beside the sea.

So snow began to fall on snow. Each summer the size of the permanent snowfield grew. The farmers marked it out with sticks. Sometimes the snow retreated. Then the farmers were happy for a year, or perhaps two. But the old woman foretold that decade by decade the summer snowfield would grow and keep on growing, faster and faster, until at last it came down the hillside and overwhelmed their crops.

And so it came to pass together with a sad succession of ‘lasts.’ In the year 1408 came the last marriage to be performed in the church with its nacre plaster. We even have the names of the bride and groom. For love flourishes even in the harshest conditions. She was Sigridur Björnsdóttir, high born and originally from Iceland, who had sailed to Greenland as a young woman to marry a man who had many farmsteads at Hvalsey. He died and she was left a widow.

Her groom in this last marriage was Thorsteinn Ólafsson, a sailor, captain of his ship in fact. He had been blown off course and by a happy accident had put in at Hvalsey in 1406. While making repairs he met and fell in love with the grieving Sigridur. And so occurred the last marriage in Hvalsey. The final recorded Norse document to come out of the settlement.

Sigridur and Thorsteinn didn’t stay long. The conditions had become too harsh. The colony was breaking up. His ship seaworthy again, Thorsteinn Ólafsson sailed out of the fjord and turned south before rounding the cape and running before the west wind up to Iceland and home.

That wasn’t the last of the colony, though; ships continued, very occasionally, to call. But the few families left who clung to their homes and to life itself through those chilling, snow-enveloping winters when all was dark, were famine struck and riddled with disease. All were desperately poor.

And in their poverty and misery and the bleakness of their environment they turned upon each other. The colony died a slow and lingering death, killed by the snow.

But before it did those that were left turned upon the old woman, who, years ago now, had foretold what would happen when snow began to fall on snow unmelted from the winter before. They accused her of witchcraft, of poisoning the colony, of bringing insanity and death to its people. She was bundled into the church and there she was condemned to death.

And in a last act, to propitiate the gods of weather, as if fire itself could drive away the snow and the white glow of the earth, the settlers tied her to a stake and used what little firewood remained to burn her to death.

It is said that those whom the Gods wish to destroy they first make mad. Today, little remains at Hvalsey, though the church, now without its turf roof and fluorescent plaster of ground mussel shells, is well known. Yet the more things change the more they stay the same. The old woman who prayed that the ice would retreat has had her prayer granted. Six hundred years later we would do well to listen to her story.

Picture is courtesy of Wikipedia

ROMAN BATHING

Virum lepidum quaero qui Dick, Jock et Snowy meminisse potest, atque cum hilara femina per litteras colloqui. Anglice respondere licet. Imago? *

Apologies for the Latin, but it seems appropriate somehow seeing as I have just been to ‘Thermae’ Bath Spa, the hot springs of the eponymous city, recently renovated as a Millennium project at some vague and improbable cost.

Elder Daughter has been threatening to take me there for ages. She takes all her friends there and I am at least an honorary friend as well as a parent. So there I was, clad in a white towelling robe, wandering about and hopping in and out of the spa waters, crystal clear and the temperature of tepid soup. Two hours of this costs all of £22, including the use of hairdryers.

And very pleasant it is too. Except that when you have nothing to do for a couple of hours you can’t help your mind wandering, and indeed wondering as it wanders. So my immediate thought on seeing my fellow incumbents dressed identically in white towelling robes and drifting about earnestly in pairs or threesomes, was that I had travelled back in time some 2000 years.

Give or take a bare shoulder or two, a towelling robe is, after all, much the same as a toga, a garment that contrives to be elegant and serious at the same time. You can’t really be silly or facetious in a robe and sandals, can you? Which is why perhaps the Romans were rather better known for their baths than their jokes.

Now it seems to me that rather than evolving bathhouse design in the last 2,000 years, we have actually gone backwards. Gone are the great decorations, the floor mosaics, gone is the social intercourse, the gaming tables, the erotic nymphs of both sexes wafting to and fro. Gone are the intricate arrays of hot pools and cold pools of washes and plunges and hot rooms and steam rooms. Gone is the rubbing down and the rubbing up, the oils and the perfumes; the food and drink of every description. Gone is actually the civilisation that was the Roman bathhouse.

Had this been two thousand years ago whoever wrote the personal advertisement with which I started this piece, and placed it with surely more hope than expectation in the London Review of Books, might have scrawled the same words on a clay tablet and left it here. For a denarius or two there may well have been attendants ready to sketch one’s ‘Imago.’

The spa waters, though, haven’t changed. Literally! Apparently ten thousand years elapses between summer rain ruining the local harvest and the same waters bubbling up out of the ground again, having been on a tour of the earth’s hot nether regions in the interim. Floating in these waters is truly therefore an authentically Roman experience.

Indeed pre-Roman for the first baths built around these springs were constructed by the father of King Lear, a figure I have never before associated with the West Country. Was it the cider, perhaps, I wanted to ask as I lay in the warm basement pool, while my bottom was massaged softly by its integral jacuzzi.

Great concrete roof supports rise like mushrooms from the floor of this pool making it more suited to an aquatic game of hide and seek than swimming. Here all is white, curved, clean and light; the chlorine-free water a turquoise blue reflection of the pool tiles.

We climb the spiral stair to the steam room. Here four giant circular cubicles steam the incumbents like suet puddings. The waft of hot essential oils in the steam room would have even have struck a chord with the Romans.

You sit and you sweat and then shower under a cascade from the centre of the ceiling. Elder Daughter, who is impervious to cold finds the steam a bit hot. I, on the other hand, who am very pervious to cold indeed, find it just the right temperature. The sort of place where one could stay all day without needing a pullover.

We climb the stairs again, this time with cold air cascading down the passageway. On the roof we descend gently into the warm waters of the rooftop pool, five stories up above the roof tops of Bath. Here you can lie in the evenings, immersed in warm water, looking up at the stars. Today I look up at the blue sky and the scudding clouds and watch people of all shapes and sizes, wondering who they are and whence they come.

I overhear a number speaking in a Birmingham accent. This is most interesting for we know accents can survive a change of language; moreover, that they endure generation after generation. Which makes me wonder whether those folk of Roman West Mercia spoke in these selfsame nasal tones; were there British centurions who sounded like Jasper Carrot?

On my wrist I wear something like a child’s watch, except that it doesn’t tell the time - at least it doesn’t tell me the time - though it will tell the earnest Australian at reception if I outstay my welcome. It is made of plastic and it opens, and locks, my locker. If I wander into the restaurant I can charge food and drink to it. I think this is a very good idea.

I go to sit in the sun on a lounger on another roof terrace, hoping that a waiter may hove in view willing to charge a glass of Pinot Grigio (Roman, you see, from Italy) to my magic wristband. Elder Daughter does her best to manage my expectations. Though various people drift in and out, they are not waiters. This is self-service says Elder Daughter.

Deprived of my ‘tonic’ I think about writing out a ‘curse’ tablet and dropping it into the pool. (The Romans apparently did a great deal of cursing and scratched their maledictions on lead tablets dropped into the hot spring). Elder Daughter dissuades me - but I am wondering if cursing couldn’t prove as good a source of revenue as glasses of Pinot served on the terrace. There is so much to curse these days.

*(I think this means something like: I am seeking a charming man who is able to remember Dick, Jock and Snowy, to share literary discussions with a funny woman. Please reply in English. Picture?)

WITH A LITTLE HELP FROM MY FRIENDS...

Our latest play ‘Art’ is ‘coming along.’ It is grinding its way along the bumpy road that leads from the first play reading to the congratulatory theatre supper on the Saturday night after the last performance. In between everyone puts in a lot of work. Frustrations abound, we take a step back or sideways for every two that we go forward, in short we ‘come along.’ The Director (Rosie) has the hard job of keeping sufficient momentum to afford steerage way. Feathers through treacle!

But slowly it is taking shape, as plays always do. The approach of opening night concentrates the mind wonderfully. Lines are learnt (or almost so); the set is built (or almost so); the props and dressing in place (or almost so). We even have a brand new grey sofa from IKEA, very comfortable. It plays its part perfectly; it is the only presence on stage that doesn’t overact.

'Art' is a play that demands strong emotion: not a lot of shouting or anger necessarily, though there is that, but simply emotion. Therein lies my problem. I am finding that, at the moment, I can’t easily successfully act and remember my lines.

I remember Alan Bennett talking once about how much good actors ‘emote.’ He was talking after doing a piece with Maggie Smith, who I suppose emotes more than most: those flashing eyes, the gracious sweeps of the limbs, the whooping voice, that crystal delivery in which you can hear every letter, let alone every syllable.

Emoting on stage is not hard - for me anyway - it seems to flow naturally from the words, but it is easy to get so caught up in the feverish intensity of the moment that suddenly - at the end of a passage - you find yourself like a flushed and stranded fish with mouth open and nothing coming out. The mind mechanisms have crashed and like awaking from a deep sleep in a panic in some strange bed you can’t remember where you are.

Of course this sort of thing is worse if you are tired or stressed or if you feel, as I did earlier this week, that I was incubating swine flu. (I’m not as it happens, but thanks for asking) Mistake followed mistake. I was conflating lines and missing cues with abandon. A toy train coming off the rails, but still bouncing valiantly along the track.

As it happened, the previous night Welsh television had re-transmitted a film about Richard Burton, who grew up not a great many miles from where I live now, the twelfth Welsh-speaking child in a family of thirteen. His father was a coal miner in the Welsh pit village of Pontrhydyfen; his mother, who died when he was two, a teacher.

‘Adopted’ by his English master in the grammar school in English-speaking Port Talbot, Philip Burton set about training him as an actor, transforming his high and strongly accented Welsh voice into the deep growl that became so famous.

I loved that voice, so strong, sonorous, resonating. Burton developed it by reciting large chunks of Shakespeare to the sheep high on the windy mountainsides of South Wales. Once this ability to speak in the open air was common among actors and politicians - Lloyd George, once addressed 10,000 people on a Caernarvon mountainside while Queen Victoria used to complain that Prime Minister William Gladstone addressed her as though she were a public meeting, so penetrating was his voice. But that’s all something of the past, diction today is a forgotten art.

Back to my own sad performance. Stumbling in the middle of yet another passage I found myself thinking of the Burton film. And suddenly to the blackness of the ether I transmitted a silent cry for help: “I’m in the s***t down here, Richard, what can I do?”

In an instant I had an answer. Like a text message to the head; a text that growled and burnt into my brain.

“Concentrate on the delivery of the words.”

I knew instantly what that meant. Instead of trying to focus on a line or on an emotion, I should instead concentrate on the delivery of each word, rolling the key ones around and spitting them out with particular stress, enjoying the tone of a word and the pattern of its syllables and making the audience appreciate it too. Not line by line, but word by word.

Did it work? Well, yes, strangely, it did. I became calmer, the lines more focused. But like much of such advice it is easier said than done. It is not simple to concentrate on the delivery of the words in a fast moving dialogue when you have to take in and react to the facial expressions of others.

But, as a technique for projecting Shakespeare to startled sheep on a mountainside it is, I am sure, infallible. “Once more unto the breach, dear friends..........”